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Do Old Programmers Need To Keep Leaping Through New Hoops?

Posted by samzenpus on from the can-I-just-get-to-work? dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: In recent years, it seems as if tech has evolved into an industry that lionizes the young. Despite all the press about 21-year-old rock-star developers and 30-year-old CEOs, though, is there still a significant market for older programmers and developers, especially those with specialized knowledge? The answer is "yes," of course, and sites like Dice suggest that older tech pros should take steps such as setting up social media accounts and spending a lot of time on Github if they want to attract interest from companies and recruiters. But do they really need to go through all of that? If you have twenty, thirty, or even forty years of solid tech work under your belt, is it worth jumping through all sorts of new hoops? Or is there a better way to keep working — provided you don't already have a job, that is, or move up to management, or get out of the game entirely in order to try something startling and new.

8 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Stupid question. by khasim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you have X years of programming experience, then you should be able to sell yourself based upon that.

    Social media and such would be useful to programmers JUST STARTING THEIR CAREERS.

    BUT! If you are an older programmer you DO need to keep expanding your knowledge. Learn newer languages / systems.

    1. Re:Stupid question. by lgw · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Social media and such would be useful to programmers JUST STARTING THEIR CAREERS.

      The only "social media" you need to be active on as a senior dev is LinkedIn. Github seems irrelevant unless your career is built on open source development.

      BUT! If you are an older programmer you DO need to keep expanding your knowledge. Learn newer languages / systems.

      Yep: it is important, to keep your skills and problem domain modern, unless you want to be constrained to an ever-shrinking niche. I started as a mainframe dev, and while a lot of the concepts are still useful (since the Cloud is just the new mainframe), none of the specific skills are. Even C++ is starting to become a bit niche, with new projects that fit in the gap between C and managed languages becoming rare (but as long as Google does a lot of C++, it's not really a worry, as enough people copy Google). Thank goodness jobs requiring COM or CORBA experience are mostly gone.

      Bit by bit, specific technical pieces become irrelevant, so it's important to keep up. Can you write a horizontally scalable application in the cloud? Bit by bit, the new stuff becomes more important (once time enough has passed to weed out the fads). There's lots of money to be made as a senior dev with a deep understanding of all the new stuff, as that's a high-demand, low-supply job.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:Stupid question. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's not only a stupid question, it's mostly a stupid assumption. The 90's are over, most IT workers worth a damn are pushing 40 and the best lead/devs/archs are well past that.

    3. Re:Stupid question. by jandersen · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The only "social media" you need to be active on as a senior dev is LinkedIn.

      I was on LinkedIn for a while, and it was worthless, IMO. I only got two kinds of contacts: From people who wanted me to follow their vanity blog, and from employment agents who seemed unable to read the parts of my CV that said "no Windows, no contracts", because all they had to offer was 6 month contracts and mostly for crappy Windows positions.That, and 'DevOps', which seems to stand for "a person who has vast knowledge about everything, but is willing to work in an assembly line style setup for a pittance". Social media is for navel-grazers.

      Yep: it is important, to keep your skills and problem domain modern, unless you want to be constrained to an ever-shrinking niche.

      However, the constant focus on programming languages is probably misplaced. We should concentrate on programming skill instead, and as senior developers, we should know a lot about design patterns. That is why technologies like C++ templates and Boost, or Java EE, are still very important: they provide a standardised platform for using design patterns and frameworks. They are also very difficult to fully master, but that gives an advantage to anyone who does.

  2. Yes means no by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    sites like Dice suggest....: "Do the same thing as the young folks"!!!

    a. Hit up social media (really, a lot of folks mislead on social media, it's a freaking ad show, we had this discussion on trust awhile back on /.)
    b. Speak up w/the megaphone on github (really, a lot of folks "reinvent the string class" on this site, it's hard to find good code except well establish projects that moved to github, it's a freaking ad show). Github is a love and hate relationship.

    Dice conclusion: Sell Sell Sell. That's what the youngins' do. What they're selling is not experience, but what you want to hear, "the potential possibilities". Especially if the company (customer) is a startup, since everyone will be looking for a new job in 6-8 months anyway. Doesn't matter if you're selling fact or fiction, just close the freakin deal! That's the attitude nowadays.

    There used to be something call a profession, you gained experience in it and then companies would be able to gauge it and even reach out to you via academic societies, professional registries, tech user groups or even unions. Doesn't exists anymore thanks to HR depts....

  3. Old programmers for old systems by satch89450 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There has been quite a discussion (including in CIO magazine) about old programmers being exactly the right people to deal with "ancient" legacy systems. There is still a lot of systems in current use written in COBOL out there, even COBOL that predates the ANSI version. FORTRAN is still surprisingly strong in the scientific community.

    The article mentions programmers continuing in niches. Me, for example. I've discovered a very nice corner where I work with RS-232 serial ports and the mistakes engineers/programmers 20-30 years my junior inflict on the community. Schools don't teach the National Semiconductor 16550 UART anymore; not to mention all the errors made trying to utilize the FIFO capabilities. (It's not engineers using the chips themselves, it's the ASIC people using the 16550 from the cell libraries!)

    I'm on the wrong side of 60, yet I've not decided when I'm going to retire...if I retire. I may just decide that, as long as I can find people who need my skills, I'll keep going until they carry me out feet-first.

  4. Re:Uh, what's the problem? by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What's so hard about being active on social media and GitHub?

    Jesus wept.

    It's not what's "hard" about it. The problem is that you have to live with yourself afterwards, with a bunch of strangers sending you highly-refined stupidity and looking for "follow-backs" and "likes" and "favorites". People posting pictures of their goddamn dinner. Then there are the bots dressed up as humans. Saying stupid cut and paste friendliness, but you don't want to block them because it just doesn't feel right and then it'll bring down the number of accounts that follow you to single digits.

    For me, social media always brings to mind the quote by the poet Charles Bukowski:

    "I don't hate people. I just feel better when they aren't around."

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  5. Re:Keeping up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm 50+, a lead developer in a company where most of the developers are young enough to be my kids. Aside from that (which I'll admit is a very weird feeling at times), there doesn't seem to be any sort of "get the old fart out of here" vibe coming from them. I get pulled aside on occasion by one of them or another and they'll ask something along the lines of "here's what I'm thinking of doing, what's your opinion? I mean, is that a good way to approach the problem?", etc. The ones on my team are there because I'm the one who suggested hiring them after an interview with them. I do sort of get uneasy about still being a developer after all this time, like it's not "normal" for me to be doing it. But I like it, so I can't see why I shouldn't continue for now.